Guidelines and deadlines for speakers

Wow! We are already receiving lots of great abstracts and inquiries. Keep sending them in!

For those who are speaking at their first BIL event, the original BIL site has speaker guidelines that may be useful in planning the content of your talk. BIL speakers (like TED speakers) typically get just 15-20 minutes to make their points sparklingly clear, so many of them consult style resources such as Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and slide:ology by Nancy Duarte to make their presentations as sharp and impactful as possible. If you are unfamiliar with these books, we strongly suggest reading at least one of them, if not both.

Technical demonstrations will take place over in the Visualization Lab, and you’ll have more time (say 30-60 minutes) to show off what you’ve been working on. Please specify the time needed in your email.

To sign up to speak or demo at BIL:PIL, please send an email to speak@bilpil.com with your name, title & company, twitter handle if you have one, a short bio (or link to your bio), and 1-2 paragraphs summarizing what you’ll talk about or demonstrate.

We also know that some of the best talks are the latest-breaking ones, so we will hold back at least 20% of the speaking time for “walk-ins.” That way, if you miss the deadline, you’ll still be able to sign up on-site.

Thanks again for your interest in BIL:PIL! Keep sending in talks, and check back (or subscribe to our RSS feed) for more news!